National Review: It’s Time for Conservatives to Own the Climate-Change Issue

My proposal resists the flawed reasoning of the radical Left
while embracing market-based solutions to reduce carbon emissions.

There
is an interesting political tactic often employed by the Left, and it follows a
predictable pattern. First, identify a problem most of us can agree on. Second,
elevate the problem to a crisis. Third, propose an extreme solution to said
crisis that inevitably results in a massive transfer of power to government
authorities. Fourth, watch as conservatives take the bait and vociferously
reject the extreme solutions proposed. Fifth and finally, accuse those same
conservatives of being too heartless or too stupid to solve the original
problem on which we all thought we agreed.

This
is the pattern we have seen play out with respect to climate change. With
ever-more-extreme “solutions” such as the Green New Deal being proposed,
conservatives have quickly taken the bait, falling into the tired political
trap set by leftists. But I believe we no longer have to do this. We can fight
back against the alarmism with tangible solutions based on reason, science, and
the free market.

I
recently joined House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy in unveiling a proposal
that takes existing innovative technologies — ones that have proven to reduce
emissions here in the United States — that the U.S. can then market and export
to the world. After all, climate change is a global issue, and with
global energy demand expected to increase by 25 percent over the next 20 years,
there is a distinct need for the U.S. to export cleaner energy sources to the
developing world, as well as to the biggest CO2 emitters, such as China and
India. Crushing our own economy, as the Green New Deal would have us do, will
not stop worldwide growth in emissions or decrease worldwide energy demand.

My
portion of the plan — called the New Energy Frontier — focuses specifically on
carbon capture, a field in which there is already promising innovation. For
instance, the company NET Power, located near my district in Houston, has developed
a natural-gas electricity plant that has the capacity to power 5,000 homes,
while capturing and recirculating CO2 back through the plant via an innovative
thermodynamic cycle. As a result, the system produces zero net emissions.

The
New Energy Frontier devotes existing funds at the Department of Energy (DOE) to
the research, development, and deployment of carbon-capture technology, so that
these kinds of innovations may then be scaled up. I also propose creating a new
“Carbon Utilization Energy Innovation Hub,” which will exist within DOE for the
sole purpose of exploring how we can make carbon dioxide useful. This hub
relies on a bedrock environmental principle: recycling byproducts, in this case
CO2, into a useful commodity. Instead of presuming CO2 is a waste product, we
should think of it as a commodity and use the CO2 that we are extracting
from power plants for everything from enhanced oil recovery to cement
production to plant growth.

Other
parts of the GOP plan include simple improvements to the 45Q tax credit for
carbon-capture projects. These would incentivize and reward those in the
industry who choose to implement carbon-capture technology. Likewise, the
“trillion trees” program assumes a simpler tack by directly encouraging the
world to plant more trees, one of the best carbon-capture technologies in world
history.

It is long past time for conservatives to point out the flawed reasoning of
the radical environmentalists. Their dogmatic obsession with a
wind-and-solar-only energy grid leads them to foolishly denounce other sources
of carbon-free energy such as nuclear power. They call for a ban on fracking,
thus ignoring the massive carbon-reducing effect of natural gas. They also
ignore the simple fact that, right now, only fossil fuels can deliver the
economic production the world relies upon. As Bill Gates astutely asks those
who advocate fiercely for wind and solar, “What’s your plan for steel?”

That is why conservatives must make the case for what has actually
worked. Owing in part to the shale revolution and our emergence as a
natural-gas superpower, the U.S. has reduced carbon emissions by around 15
percent since 2005. Contrast that success with countries such as
Germany, which dove headfirst into renewables with a $580 billion investment,
but still saw an increase in per capita emissions. Why? After the self-imposed
destruction of its own energy supply, Germany was forced to rely on Russian
gas, which has a 40 percent higher carbon footprint than American natural gas.
Good intentions and dogmatic obsessions with eliminating fossil fuels have
utterly failed the environmental cause, yet activists continue to faithfully
cling to them. The notion of “focusing on what works” has been lost in the
conversation.

Calls for a carbon tax are similarly misguided. Even if we were to implement
a carbon tax, such a policy might inadvertently increase emissions as
our cleaner, better-regulated American oil-and-gas industry potentially cedes
market share to less clean Russian and Saudi producers. At the risk of stating
the obvious, the developing world won’t stop demanding energy just because we
decide to tax ourselves more.

Conservatives can either tackle the issue of carbon emissions sensibly by
proposing workable solutions, or run the risk of allowing the Democrats to do
it for us — with policies that would offer marginal environmental benefits at a
devastating cost to the economy.

As Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), my colleague, said of
this dichotomy, “If you don’t like the Green New Deal, then come up with your
own ambitious, on-scale proposal to address the global climate crisis. Until
then, we’re in charge.”

We don’t want them in charge. It’s time to start promoting conservative
solutions. The New Energy Frontier is exactly that.